Former Axios reporter says the outlet ignored her story about Swalwell

 by Andrea Widburg

One of the problems in today’s political world is that it’s very difficult to rely on what media outlets churn out. To their credit, few affirmatively lie, although it’s always possible to make mistakes. However, many of them fail to report on newsworthy stories if those stories might harm their preferred candidate or issue. You can call it a lie by omission.

With Eric Swalwell having been swept off the political playing board, it’s coming out that—just as with Joe Biden’s dementia—everyone in the Democrat world knew what was going on. However, they kept quiet because it was politically expedient. Most recently, a former reporter for Axios, one of the new “trust us” media outlets, seemingly admits that she brought the story to Axios, which conveniently ignored it.

In 2016, Jim VandeHei, Michael Allen, and Roy Schwartz founded Axios. Although there’s little online about Schwartz, both Vandehei and Allen were previously affiliated with the left-leaning Politico. Vandehei was Politico’s former executive editor and co-founder, while Allen was a former chief political reporter for Politico. Before Politico, Vandehei wrote for The Washington Post, while Allen wrote for The New York Times. Neither is likely to be politically conservative.

Axios was designed to let people see stories at a glance, with bullet-point paragraphs that spell out the key points of the story. Its articles are short, punchy, and ostensibly very factual. It once used the tagline, “Smart, efficient news worthy of your time, attention, and trust.” (Emphasis mine.)

Its “vision” page continues that theme:

We're in a post-news era. America’s information ecosystem is badly broken, deeply polluted and increasingly dangerous. 

Too many people are lost. They don’t know what or who to trust, what actually matters — or what’s even real. Confusion, anxiety and mistrust are soaring. AI will make this worse before it gets better.

Why it matters: Axios is hellbent on being part of the solution.

What traditional news media companies can do is be useful, trusted, illuminating sources of vital information that’s vetted by experts held to high standards of accuracy and truthfulness. That calling is more important than ever. 

• That’s what Axios aspires to every day. We’re imperfect — but proud of how we’ve helped millions get smarter, faster on what matters most. And proud we did this without an opinion page pumping out more partisan noise.  

Thank you for caring about truth & reality.

And on its “ethics” page, it assures people:

Axios strives to be worthy of our audience’s trust. Our duty is to report news fairly using journalism’s best practices and to always be transparent in what we do.

We take our audience’s trust very seriously in everything we do. All of our journalists pledge to follow our Code of Ethics, part of which we share below.

Truth. Trust. Facts. It’s all there at Axios. But is it really?

Recently, Bethany Allen, a former Axios and Foreign Policy reporter, attacked Fox, Breitbart, and Newsmax for not digging up the Swalwell story:

Fox News has one of the biggest and best-funded newsrooms in the US. Why didn't Fox News publish an investigation into Swalwell's sexual misconduct?

Why didn't Breitbart? Newsmax? The Daily Caller?

And why is no one in the right-wing media ecosystem asking these questions? pic.twitter.com/0tyVRLwZMt

— Bethany 貝書穎 (@BethanyAllenEbr) April 16, 2026

Yes, it certainly would have been nice if they’d done so. Having said that, it seems that Swalwell’s propensities were well known in Democrat circles, and might not have been leaked out to conservatives. As we learned during the #MeToo movement, leftists tend to talk only when it’s time to un-person something. Other than that, everybody knows, but nobody says anything.

In other words, this should have been a story that an enterprising, trustworthy, fact-oriented left-leaning outlet broke. And that’s where another Bethany Allen tweet comes in.

In a back-and-forth with Stephen L. Miller, Bethany stated that she brought news about Swalwell’s sexual escapades to her employer, only for the publication to bury it:

I did not play it down. I very much wanted to report it out myself. But MeToo stories on the Hill aren't related to my beat, as much as I personally wish I could report them out. I passed the tip along to colleagues on the Hill beat.

— Bethany 貝書穎 (@BethanyAllenEbr) April 13, 2026

The way Stephen L. Miller frames this, her employer at the time seems to have been Axios:

You have a former Axios reporter ADMITTING she heard rumors of Swalwell. She decided not to report them, but instead forward them on to "collegues" in the year 2020.

There were zero AXIOS stories about Swalwell's behavior in 2020.

Media corruption from @mikeallen and… pic.twitter.com/1m5lKHdJQg

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) April 16, 2026

You are literally admitting your Axios colleagues ignored the story, because the claim you passed on was ignored.

Why you choose to keep admiting what a shameless, unprincipled journalistic hack you are is astounding to me. pic.twitter.com/lJ3MXUP7Ok

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) April 16, 2026

So far as I can tell—and I stand ready to be corrected—no one has rebutted Miller’s statement that it was Axios that buried the story.

If my understanding of this thread is correct (and I think it is), everybody (on the left) knew about Swalwell’s offensive behavior. And nobody on the left, including the leftist media, wanted the American public to know.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/04/a_former_axios_reporter_says_the_outlet_ignored_her_story_about_swalwell.html